Tomorrow Woman

8 years ago - 19-year-old Clara is kidnapped by Professor Ivo. She is implanted with bio-cybernetics so that he can duplicate her biology & build his Tomorrow Woman android. Her memory is wiped and she is returned to school.

7 years ago - 20-year-old Clara begins her internship at a local radio station.

3 years ago - The Tomorrow Woman android successfully infiltrates the Watchtower. She achieves independence and chooses to sacrifice herself to save the team while fighting a Daemonite Temporal War Beast. In her last moment, her awareness briefly touches all of time. The android's conciousness is uploaded into 24-year-old Clara Kendall's mind in her moment of death. She is found by Vera Black at the behest of Rip Hunter, who helps her understand her new trans-temporal awareness. She joins the Elite.

During Grant Morrison's run on Justice League there is a very deliberate focus on classic Justice League villains, bringing them back and redesigning them in ways that at once resigned them but also let them thrive. In a single issue (issue #5, off the top of my head), Morrison brought back classic mad scientist villains TO Morrow and Professor Ivo by having them create a android that poses as a new hero who was recruited into the Justice League, and who went on to win the admiration and trust of the team. Tomorrow Woman went on to sacrifice herself to save the team, effectively growing beyond the limitations of her programming. She's a well liked character; She has an original and yet classic look, her advanced telepathy and telekinesis powers meshed well into the Justice League in practice, and by telling her complete story in a single issue she became a very well liked character concept. She turned up in a few other books here and there, but for the most part she's at her best when used in just this one story.

So of course, we decided to use her even more.

When we decided to build our new Elite team out of existing DC characters that together would emulate the feel of a Wildstorm team and chose the Wildcats as our template, Tomorrow Woman immediately came to mind as an option. With just a little bit of expansion on her story, we think she will fulfill the same role as the character Void.

Obviously, the first step was to come up with a functional reason why the character still exists after her sacrifice to save the Watchtower, which we absolutely want to keep. The solution came in the idea that Ivo & Morrow's design was actually based on a real person. The stated source of her powers are her 'mutated 4-lobed brain', which is honestly a pretty cool power source. The name Clara Kendall is from one of the later appearances of the character, but the end result is a real person on earth who is unaware of her connection to a android superhero until the day that android dies and uploads her consciousness into her mind. Also, in keeping with her name, we decided we wanted to give her a sort of precognition, an extra sense that taps into some awareness of potential futures. To that end, and to give her a connection to the Daemonite threat the Elite battles, we made the creature the android gave her life to defeat a "Daemonite Temporal War Beast". In the instant of her death, she is momentarily conscious of all time.

Rather than to have Clara be a full reincarnation of the android character, we prefer to think of her as a seperate person suddenly endowed with huge power and awareness, coming to her in own in how she uses it, discovering what it means to earn the legacy of a short-lived but well-loved character.